In Othello (1602), the Egyptian’s warning challenges the patriarchal obsession to enforce morality and chastity on women. She infers promiscuity on men by feminising the exotic trope of the cursed object:

Othello: That’s a fault. That handkerchief

Did an Egyptian to my mother give,

She was a charmer and could almost read

The thoughts of people. She told her, while she kept It

‘Twould make her amiable and subdue my father

Entirely to her love; but if she lost it

Or made a gift of it, my father’s eye

Should hold her loathed and his spirits should hunt

After new fancies. She, dying, gave it me

And bid me, when my fate would have me wive,

To give it her. I did so, and – take heed on’t!

Make it a darling, like your precious eye! –

To lose’t or give’t away were such perdition

As nothing else could match. (III.4, lines 57-69)

The Egyptian transforms the handkerchief into a womb-like space symbolising the impregnated maternal ‘other’. By replicating the intimacy between the mother and her unborn child, a point supported by Emilia’s observation that Desdemona uses the handkerchief ‘To kiss and talk to’ (III.iii, line 300), the handkerchief also creates an unbreakable bond between husband and wife. Othello’s father is faithful because the handkerchief is a symbol of maternal ‘otherness’ or a female authority he finds security with. The implication is -Continue Reading>

Othello’s toleration or, more accurately, his masochistic acceptance of his barbaric past that is a surplus requirement of his European identity, is demonstrated in his ‘travailous history’ (1.3, line 140) that captivates Desdemona:

Wherein of antres vast and deserts idle
Rough quarries, rocks and hills whose heads touch heaven
It was my hint to speak – such was my process –
And of the cannibals that each other eat,
The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders… (1.3, lines 141-146)

Othello describes a non-European space characterised by its vast caves and empty deserts. The implied gigantic scale of uncultivated land is confirmed by the alliteration in ‘Rough quarries, rocks and hills whose heads touch/heaven’. The pathetic fallacy of the ‘hills whose heads touch/heaven’ indicates exotic phallic excess that threatens to exceed its boundaries. The border created between the -Continue Reading>

Introduction to ‘The Mermaid’

The story ‘The Mermaid’ is my second submission for the NYC Midnight Flash Fiction Challenge 2011. I had forty-eight hours to write a horror story set in an aquarium incorporating mouthwash in a thousand words or under. In the English Renaissance, mermaids can be grouped with the monstrous hybrids that are located in the deserts and frozen wastelands occupying the map edges. These creatures are indicative of what John Gillies calls, ‘The link between monstrosity, margins and sexual “promiscuity”‘ (Gillies 13). Therefore, hybrids are ‘the offspring of literally “promiscuous” unions between creatures of different kinds’ (13). Such fecundity occurs far from Europe’s civilised borders in the barbaric lands of Asia, Africa, the East Indies and the New World.

The themes of barbarity, promiscuity and miscegenation are prevalent in Shakespeare’s Othello (1602). Othello’s barbaric roots that are often attributed to his descent Continue reading →

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Early Modern Exchanges
The official blog of Early Modern Exchanges that studies the diverse cultural, historical, economic and social exchanges between England and Europe, European countries, the Old World and the New in the period 1450-1800.